Hi, I've come to a deadlock while reading a book entitled "The Mission Walker". Would anyone tell me the meaning of the expression "alternate reality"?

Quote:

"For me, walking is a transcendent physical, emotional, and spiritual experience, like dancing. "If I can move, I am not sick.” That is my alternate reality. And I believe with all my will in that reality. So when cancer strikes again and again, I walk to stay alive."

Hi, I've come to a deadlock while reading a book entitled "The Mission Walker". Would anyone tell me the meaning of the expression "alternate reality"?

Quote:

"For me, walking is a transcendent physical, emotional, and spiritual experience, like dancing. "If I can move, I am not sick.” That is my alternate reality. And I believe with all my will in that reality. So when cancer strikes again and again, I walk to stay alive."

Here is my guess: The person in the quote is sick. That is the reality that most of us would accept. However, he/she believes that when he/she walks, he/she isn't sick. That is her reality, an "alternate reality" that doesn't follow the normal idea of what we think "reality" is.

Thank you, Lorikeet, for answering my question.
So, may I understand that 'alternate reality' is some kind of belief that a person has as their own reality as opposed to what is generally believed in the society? I also found out that 'alternate reality' is the same as 'parallel universe', which I suppose means that the particular belief is parallel to the ordinary idea in our conventional world and that these two ideas never mix with each other.
I wonder how you could express the same idea in other words.

That's interesting. The only time I've heard "parallel universe" is in science fiction. That's usually when there's another world that is similar to ours, but the history turned out differently, when the outcomes of wars were different, etc. I guess you could also say that would be an alternate reality.

I found out and realized myself that alternate reality is the one which can be created by our imagination and where we may build our personalities and everything which surrounds us as we want it to be.